Call of the wild

John Howard reckons it wins elections, but others say we've been conned about the power of talkback. Sue Javes reports.

When Haydn Sargent was asked to present a morning show on Brisbane's 4BC in the 1970s, he was leery of embracing talkback. Despite the growing popularity of early practitioners such as John Pearce, Ron Casey and John Laws, he told colleagues at the time: "Even in Sydney, it's only a matter of time before those programs run out of suckers willing to be insulted."

How wrong he was. Nearly 40 years after the then federal government bowed to pressure and allowed radio stations to put callers live-to-air, the format is more popular and more influential than ever.

At any time of the day or night, from the home, car or office, individuals take part in radio's gabfest to gripe, praise, commiserate, inquire or simply share their experiences with radio hosts and other listeners. Politicians love it because they can set the news agenda of the day, avoiding more probing questions from journalists, and be seen to be talking to the people at the same time. Where talkback was once considered largely the domain of housewives needing a distraction from their morning chores, it is now widely regarded as a litmus test of community feeling and a form of people power for the disenfranchised.

Former prime minister Paul Keating famously said: "Forget the Canberra press gallery. If you educate John Laws, you educate the people."

No other politician has used the medium more to his advantage than the incumbent, John Howard, who said: "Talkback radio has played a greater role in shaping the outcome of an election over the last few years than other sections of the media."

The Australian's veteran political commentator, Paul Kelly, told readers to forget street rallies, town halls, trades hall and the pulpit. "Radio jocks are the new mobilisers and organisers of mass opinion."

I had my own brief personal taste of talkback behind the scenes as a young researcher for the then undisputed king of talkback, John Laws, in 1980. I manned the switchboard on his first day back on 2UE after a decade at 2UW. The first call I took was a sobbing woman threatening to end her life. Laws's producer, a man named Stan Zemanek, didn't hesitate. "Get rid of her," he ordered, while I rang Lifeline on the quiet.

They were looking for something more uplifting and there were always plenty of callers to choose from. There were floods of them and they'd wait patiently while Laws conducted the show like an orchestra, choosing his next guest from my brief description on a computer screen. If a listener was after information, Laws would be supplied with the answer before he took the call, creating a sense of infallibility.

Politicians who had been lined up by the producer in advance were asked to introduce themselves on air, allowing themselves to play second fiddle to the radio host. Part of the job was to keep the callers on a string, sometimes for more than an hour, and when time ran out and the sign-off music played, those who were left would usually accept the apology meekly. If they were cheesed off, they never held Laws responsible. He was their friend. For his part, Laws wasn't indifferent to his callers, but the driving philosophy was that show business came first, and the callers were the fuel that kept the wheels turning.

Not much has changed over the decades. When I sat in on the Ray Hadley morning show on 2GB recently, the only noticeable difference was the more sophisticated technology. The dynamics driving the callers were the same.

John Brennan, who has produced or overseen more talkback than anyone else in Australian radio history, describes it as God's little equaliser. Anyone with a telephone, he says, can "share a moment with the prime minister, have a joke with Vince Sorrenti, or ask Nicole Kidman a question she's never been asked". With more than half a century of radio behind him, and now program director at 2GB, Brennan remains the guru of commercial talkback or, as he calls it, radio wrestling. "People don't call to chat, they call to agree or disagree. The presenter has to decide quickly whose side they're on. The hardest job for the host is to inspire a person to call in the first place. My benchmark for deciding which calls to put to air is if they make you frustrated, angry, happy or sad. They're the calls which bring more calls."

So who are they, these people who keep the airwaves filled? Are they, as some media critics believe, mostly ignorant rednecks whose prejudices are easily exploited by the more extreme talkback hosts, or are they more representative of mainstream opinion?

Surprisingly, little research has been done on either the callers or the listeners, but Queensland academic Professor Graeme Turner is a few months into a three-year research project on the issue. His interest was piqued by the cash-for-comment inquiry of 1999 and the realisation that talkback had largely replaced current affairs on commercial radio.

The director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural studies at the University of Queensland, Turner wants to explore the social function of talkback, the relationship between host and caller and whether it really does reflect the opinions of the broader community. "Early indications suggest the traditional audience is mostly over 50, Australian-born, working class and right wing, but there has never been any formal research," he says.

Turner believes talkback revolves around notions of community and membership. "Listeners feel they belong to some kind of society. They can gain access to that place, that social centre ... Callers have told me about the sense of empowerment they feel being able to make other people listen to them."

Peter Maher, executive director of media monitor Rehame, says talkback callers can be divided into three categories. "There's the self-interested caller who rings up because he or she has been personally affected by a certain event. There's the issues caller who has very strong feelings about a particular subject, such as Tampa or the Bulldogs. The third is the opinion caller, who is not personally affected but has an opinion on everything from Iraq to Peter Hollingworth."

Sydney's four talkback stations (2GB, 2UE, 2SM and the ABC) host dozens of programs of varying styles and passions almost 24 hours a day, with John Laws still prominent but no longer dominant. He and key rival Ray Hadley tend to run their talkback components over a predictable range of topics, with law and order a popular recurring theme.

But they're mild compared with night-time commercial radio. 2UE's night-time stirrer, Stan Zemanek, has embraced Brennan's philosophy to the extreme. Zemanek says his show is the modern equivalent of the soap box in the Domain. People get up on the pedestal, have their say and the crowd either boos or cheers. He considers it a badge of honour that the Australian Broadcasting Authority receives more complaints about his show than any other.

Hot night-time topics include immigration, welfare, single mothers and Aborigines, but Zemanek again says the issue that always guarantees the most calls is law and order and fears for personal safety.

What Zemanek calls "terrific entertainment", the Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, calls "talkback terrorism". In a speech last year, Cowdery accused many talkback presenters of simplifying issues, often by omitting relevant material, especially if it was complicated, and erecting an adversarial framework of conflict.

"If the promoter of one view can be portrayed as a baddie and the other as a goodie (or, even better, a victim) then so much the better," he said. "Conflict sells. People are prone to act emotionally, rather than intellectually, to their entertainment. They are usually not tempted to analyse the information they are given and to identify the gaps in fact or logic."

ABC 702 has proved in recent years talkback does not have to be adversarial to be effective and popular. Richard Glover, Sydney's top-rating drivetime talk host, says the best talkback comes from people sharing their experiences rather than giving their opinions.

"The methodology in commercial radio is to put out an issue that will get people upset and have them shouting at the radio," Glover says. "You end up with whinge wireless - a very one-note program which is quite boring because all the callers tend to have a similar point of view, similar tone, similar age and gender. The aim of good media is to leave people with an accurate sense of reality, full of light and shade, that contains the challenging things about life and the things to be joyous about. Our callers are encouraged to talk about their experiences and the result, I think,

is a richer, more interesting program."

Maher says it would be foolhardy for a politician to ignore the daily feedback coming from talk radio. "You're not going to get a better daily barometer of what is affecting, impacting or upsetting the daily constituency than what those talkback callers will give you ... If you compare the calls to what the polls are saying, they nearly run hand in hand."

Social commentator and author Hugh Mackay could not disagree more strongly. He believes it's extremely dangerous for politicians to place too much credence on talkback. "They assume this is representative of society at large when it's not. It's not even representative of listeners of talkback. It's only representative of the small percentage of people who choose to call radio stations. Those people tend to be slightly more rabid, more conservative and generally more lonely than the community at large. Talkback can also be manipulated by the political parties, the religious right, by any special interest group that wants to stack the calls on a particular day."

Mackay believes the talkback industry has the politicians conned. If 9 per cent of Sydney listens to John Laws, there's another 91 per cent who don't. Alan Jones might win the breakfast slot with a 13 per cent audience share but there's a huge 87 per cent not listening, and the people who call in are even more in the minority.

Regardless, John Howard and Mark Latham will be spending a substantial part of their next few months trudging from one radio studio to another, feeding the beast that is talkback.

A brief history of talkback

In the early days of radio, in the 1920s, there were experiments with listeners phoning in questions, but the Postmaster-General's department quickly stepped in and declared it illegal. Radio historian Wayne Mac believes authorities were worried about the broadcast of undesirable language or libellous material because, at the time, there were no tape-delay systems.

The arrival of television in the late '50s signalled the end of radio quiz shows and serials, and radio needed a new attraction. One of the forefathers of the format was former Pick-a-Box champion and later politician Barry Jones. He had a 90-minute show on Melbourne's 3DB in early 1967 called Talk Back to Barry Jones. To stay within the law, he would say his piece on air and then sprint down the corridor to the telephones while a record was playing. He'd then sprint back to the microphone to tell listeners what the callers had said.

Talkback was finally introduced, with Parliament's blessing, on April 17, 1967. Radio veteran John Brennan was working at 2SM the day it was launched. "Mike Walsh was poised to launch the first legal phone-in program, starting at 9am on 2SM, but at the last minute 2UE announced Ormsby Wilkins would take a short burst of calls at midnight so he could say he was the first," Brennan says. "But you'd have to say Walsh was the first presenter to have his own talkback program."

But, by the end of the '80s, commercial radio was in dire financial straits, largely as a result of the then federal government's exorbitant prices for FM licences. To ensure the viability of the industry, the government reduced the stations' obligation to employ journalists and provide news and current affairs. Almost overnight, commercial stations dropped their news-analysis programs, replacing them with talkback.

Mobile-phone use has led to a huge increase in the volume and diversity of callers. Programmers say that in the '70s and '80s most calls originated from housewives, the unemployed or retirees. Mobile phones made talkback more accessible and strengthened the format by widening the "backyard" to include more men, a slightly younger demographic and more workers.